While at kvraudio.com, I found a cool freeware program that generates MIDI chords when you click on the chord names in its GUI. The chords play a soft synth of your choice, and you can record the notes.

There are over 200 chords in the program, The GUI is unique -- worth checking out. I learned a lot about chord theory from it.

The link below goes to a kvr page with my instructions on using ChordSpace, called 'Setting Up ChordSpace in Cakewalk Sonar.' It took a while to figure it out!

http://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=1624998#1624998

Hope this is helpful to keyboard-challenged folks, or to anyone who wants to understand chords better.

But Plain ol Band in a box has not only cords but allows you to set a key and construct a tune with as many parts as you wish. But the big hang up is it's not a plugin you can so easily manipulate. But you can build songs and export these into Sonar as a midi file. I found it to be quite a learning tool when I first started using the computer to sequence music. The concept is simple and the execution is amazing. With drums and bass and a particular style selected you can rough in a tune so fast it's just hard to believe. And it's all centered on music theory. If you know little about how music works this app can at least get you going fast. And if you take the time to dissect the parts and see what's happening it can be a teaching tool. In fact it's ability as a learning tool is exceptional. It can keep you on key and tempo while letting you take as much control as you want. Have a little melody in your head and want to build a song around it? Enter in the notes and BiaB can build up cords around it. Got cords and need a bass line in a particular style? Or drums? As a sketch pad for tunes it works better than anything I ever tried.

The demo is at pgmusic.com or at least the last time I checked. The core program is cheep but add on's drive the price up. If you'd like to just use cords to construct tunes with this app has got the edge. It can't make you into a musical genius but it can get you started really fast, has tons of little extras that make a workable tune fast. I would do a simple piano bass drums and export. Then edit that up in sonar and use different sounds. It's all midi so what ever you use can be modified to suit your need. Why use it? Well, when your building a tune and new to midi, Ideas are what you need most and BiaB displays musically correct Ideas. The bass line will be in the proper key and follow the rules well. Same with drums depending on what style you select. The cords it uses are correct and shows inversions. You just want to see ideas on a short phrase of cords and see different styles of baselines? Like I said, as a sketch pad it works very well.